Everything You Need to Know About Dream Chaser, America's Next Space Plane

Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president and head of SNC's Space Systems, has a better than front-row seat for America's historic private space movement—he's a player on the main stage. Sirangelo heads one of three companies that is designing spacecraft to bring humans into orbit for NASA.

You submitted a proposal to NASA in late January for the next phase of the commercial crew programtaking astronauts to the International Space Station. What will the contract look like if you win?

Two things that happen in the contract. One is that we, working together with NASA, would produce and certify a vehicle that's ready for flight. So if it was an airplane, for example, it would be the FAA certifying a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The second part was to bid on up to six flights ... taking crew and critical cargo back and forth to the space station. We expect the service to last probably at least a decade or so.

Will this contract be structured much differently than your earlier ones?

The new contract is a typical government federal acquisition contract. However, it varies in a couple of key ways. The companies continue to own the vehicle. So we are the owner of Dream Chaser, we provide a service to NASA. NASA isn't buying the vehicle. In the past, NASA paid companies to develop the space shuttle for it but then NASA owned the space shuttle. This is the opposite of that. NASA is paying a portion of price, we're paying a significant portion as well, to develop the vehicle.

That gives us the opportunity to sell the capacity to do more launches, and bring more jobs and more resources to the United States. Right now NASA is buying that service from Russia at approximately $70 million a seat. The intent here, with this program, is really to bring that development, those jobs, and that effort back into the United States so that the U.S. would launch its astronauts on a space system built and designed in the United States and launched from the United States.

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The contract is set at a fixed price. What happens if NASA says, "Hey, listen, we need to test this component or system." Do you have to pay for that extra cost?

Embedded in the proposal is a smaller amount of money, I think $150 million, to be set aside as a contingency fund in the event that NASA wanted to ask for more testing. That's a really good thing because frankly, none of us really knows what the future's going to look like. I mean, we're another human spaceflight vehicle for God's sake. I'm in the center of it; I've been here since the very beginning and I still can't do that. So I think we all have to realize that there's going to be a lot of learning still to come. I think they've gone about this in a very smart and very proactive way.

So how's the vehicle?

Our first vehicle was our version of the Enterprise, if you know the space shuttle program. Enterprise was built never to go to orbit, but to do all the atmospheric tests. We built our version of that, and that was the vehicle that flew a few months ago. It's going to fly continuously this year. But that vehicle's never going to go to orbit. The biggest thing it was going to do was to create a database [describing] how does this fly.

So we started our flight-test program. [In March], we'll be releasing a press release that confirms that all the data that we were seeking to take from the flight. We actually got more data than we expected. NASA had certified all the flight characteristics of the vehicle already from the flights that we've done. Basically, the vehicle flies like it's supposed to fly. And for someone who's an engineer and an aircraft designer, that's probably the best news.

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The drop-test flight was a success, even though the landing gear broke at the end of it?

The incident with the landing gear was regrettable, no doubt. But it was fairly isolated. One of the compromises in building a vehicle that wasn't going to go to orbit was that we said, we're not going to waste the time to design a full-on landing-gear system right now. That's being designed for the orbital vehicle. For the purpose of what we need, we can borrow an aircraft landing gear, which is what we did from a plane called the F-5, which has tens of thousands of landings around the world. So we actually used existing landing gear ... and one of the two landing gears didn't deploy properly, and when it didn't deploy, the vehicle wound up skidding off the runway. It sustained no permanent damage, and the same vehicle is now being outfitted for the next level of flight tests, which will be higher, faster, and with people. The cause of the problem was ... some contamination in the hydraulic fluid, [small pieces of metal] that was pumped into the vehicle. That hung the gear up just long enough so that it didn't deploy fast enough, the one side. [But] we got perfection from the flight, which was really the more important.

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Dream Chaser is described as a mini-shuttle, but does that description make sense?

Interestingly enough, even though we're a fraction of the size of the shuttle, we have more pressurized space inside our vehicle than the shuttle did. And that means more room for people.

The way I characterize it is the shuttle is sort of like the big moving truck that takes you from New York to Florida. It has a cab up front and a huge back to take all the big pieces and all your furniture and things. And that's what was needed to build the space station and get up into space. Once you're in Florida, you don't want to be around town in that thing, so you have an SUV. We're sort of the SUV for space. We can put the seats down and take all cargo. We can actually fly without a pilot.

Because Dream Chaser is smaller than the shuttle, does that mean it doesn't need those long runways to come back down?

We're planning to bring the vehicle back to different places around the country. Because we have no hazardous material on board, our engines and our systems are nontoxic, we can actually land in any airport that can take a 737. And we can fly home inside a cargo plane. Unlike the shuttle, we don't need a special carrier. It's actually movable by truck if we wanted it to.

The idea hereand obviously we have to work through a lot of different permissionsis, wouldn't it be terrific if we brought America's space program to America? And instead of having people come to see the shuttle land in Florida or California, we could plan landings on our return trips to different places around the country where those states or the universities or the high schools could bring the students out and get to see the space program. And wouldn't that be a terrific thing to spark the next generation and education, if people could actually experience firsthand what space is like?

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How is the integration with the launch vehicle, the Atlas V, coming along?

Yeah, it's a good question. We made a decision now, almost six and a half years ago, to use the Atlas V for our human spaceflights. That's based on the fact that the Atlas is the most successful and prolific U.S. rocket. There have been more than 36, I think, flights of the Atlas V and more than 100 flights of the Atlas family. And every one of the Atlas V's has performed perfectly. If we're going to bring humans to space, and we're going to develop a certification plan, one of the best ways to start that is to start with something that's pretty solid underneath you. That's why we worked out a relationship with ULA (United Launch Alliance).

How do we mate the Dream Chaser to the Atlas? The main body is a device we call the Elvis, LVIS, which is the launch-vehicle interface system. Basically, it's the connector point between Dream Chaser and the Atlas V.

We're flying on top. We learned from the shuttle not to go on the sides. That eliminates all or many of the issues that the shuttle had. [Editor's note: This includes debris coming off the launch vehicle and damaging the spacecraft, which doomed one shuttle during reentry.] But it also allows us to fly off of the rocket and abort. Our abort system is internal to the vehicle, so that if there's a problem, we detach, we fly off of the rocket, and we land on the shuttle landing strip a few miles away. And if we don't abort, we actually carry all that power to space. That allows us to fly around and do things in space.

We use our own rocket motors inside Dream Chaserwhat we call the hybrid rocket motors. These are the motors that won the X Prize for Spaceship One. It's the motor system that's being used by Virgin Galactic, and it's the motor system we'll use on Dream Chaser. The motors are made of rubber, and the gas that we use is nitrous oxide, so it's effectively recycled tires and laughing gas is the system. That sounds silly, but it's actually a damn good motor and does what it's supposed to do. It's stable, it's neutral, it can't explode. And it's nontoxic, so we can bring it home and fly it into an airport anywhere in the country without any issues.

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How does the Dream Chaser's NASA heritage help you?

NASA started this idea with something called the HL 20, which was going to be the crew rescue vehicle for the space station. And they worked on this design for a number of years. And then the space station went down to a small crew, and they put this vehicle aside. We licensed it out of NASA and took it on.

So, ULA brings the rocket. We're bringing the vehicle, which has now been under development with us for 10 years. And NASA actually developed for it for 10 years before us. So we have a vehicle that now has over 20 years of design work on it. And we have a rocket that has over 36, 37 flights already, will have over 40 by the time we use it. For space that's a pretty good heritageabout as good as you can get.

How does the rocket fly differently if it doesn't have a shroud, meaning the spacecraft is exposed on the tip?

One of the very first things we asked was, what happens if we put this vehicle with this shape on top of a rocket? It turns out the shroud isn't needed at all. The lifting body produces no lift in the normal flight of the rocket until it needs to produce lift, which is much later. The stresses of the launch actually get transferred through the vehicle into the adaptor and into the rocket. So in some ways [it] makes the rocket more stable because it focuses the energy right where it's supposed to be ... Our vehicle is intended to fly through and return to home, so the forces we have to go through to reenter are far greater than the forces of going out of orbit on the top of a rocket. So the vehicle's actually designed for the very difficult, challenging, and heat-inducing problems of return, which means the launch actually is not a significant issue.

A lot of people say, "Well, it seems like you got less than what they asked for." The truth of the matter is that this was the most successful funding year that we've ever had. And just to put it into perspective, the House of Representatives four years ago provided zero as their recommendation for the commercial crew. This year they agreed with the Senate to provide a number that was in excess of $600 million. It was one of only a handful of programs that actually has, over the last four years, consistently gotten more money each year.

[Some people think] the president requests a budget and we didn't get the what the president requested. Well, the truth of the matter is that virtually nothing gets what the president requests. What you want to look at is the growth from year to year, and the cohesiveness this year of the Senate and the House and the president all becoming pretty ingrained around the program. And the program got almost 25 percent more money this year than it did last year.

Everybody realizes we don't want to be putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the Russian space program forever. And I think that's what's driving us more than anything.

That maybe true, but NASA's Space Launch System and James Webb Telescope got full funding

Of course. SLS and Orion and the James Webb are all marquee programs and have a lot of political strength behind them. They got good money, and we're actually supportive of that. One of the unique parts of Dream Chaser is, it is not competitive with NASA's long-distance rocket or human spaceflight program. We're not going beyond earth with Dream Chaser. And therefore, we're complementary in many ways. That's why Lockheed has joined our team. Lockheed does the Orion program [now part of SLS]. And we're actually sharing lessons learned between Dream Chaser and Orion, which helps the government and might save some money for everybody in the future and makes us more seamless. Lockheed set up a second production line for Dream Chaser in its Louisiana operation, in the Michaud facility outside New Orleans. We're talking to them in terms of doing processing in the same building that Orion gets processed in.

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There's no reason these programs can't coexist. They should coexist. And why not save the government money if we can? And why not use facilities that have already been qualified? Why would I want to go build my own facility in Texas or California if I've got one in Florida that already does the job?

Do you think more than one company will be funded? NASA's inspector general warned only one company could be funded.

Nobody knows the future. But we are committed to the program and we believe that NASA sees a good reason to have more than one type of vehicle in space. We don't have one kind of aircraft in the Air Force. We don't have one ship in the Navy. Having a lifting body, a piloted space plane alongside of other types of programs that do other things better than we could, I think that's what really drives this. And we're the only ones really doing that, from a human spaceflight point of view or from a science point of view.

I don't know what NASA's going to do. Personally, I think it will be more than one company. And I don't think it's going to be the half-award kind of thing. [Editor's note: This means funding one company fully, and another at half that amount, as some NASA officials have suggested.] I think it might be that the companies get staged differently on their schedule so that maybe the first couple of years Company A gets a little bit more money, and then it tapers off. And then Company B gets more money in the subsequent years.

I think we're probably the furthest ahead on the human spaceflight vehicle of the three companies. But none of us are really at the point where we can say, yeah, we're all ready to go. We're all still a couple of years away from that. So the idea that by August we're going to make a final down-select to one design when we're the only ones actually flying? It doesn't sound logical to me. But who knows? Sometimes illogical things happen.

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What happens if you don't win?

We're going to be continuing our flight-test program this year. We announced that our first launch is November 2016. We bought the rocket to do that. That's going to happen regardless of what goes on with NASA. But the longer we stay in the program, the more mature the vehicle gets, the more likely we can use it for other types of programs. And that's really our goal, and that's why we're investing as much money and time as we are.

Looking at potential customers beyond NASA: Which comes first, the ability to reach orbit affordably, or the demand to go there? Or do they need to grow concurrently?

It's not just Congress that sees the concrete examples, right? It's the other potential markets, and there are three or four that we have been working on hard. And they're seeing the fact that we're real, too. And they know the rocket. Now they see the vehicle being built. By the end of this year, we'll have gone through a whole bunch more flight tests and advancement of the technology. We're in critical design review now with the program. So that certainly gives people a lot more confidence.

What markets are you were focusing on?

One is what we call the servicing market: the ability to repair, replace, refuel satellites that are already in existence in lower orbit. In this age where we don't have a lot of money, the idea of restoring something and repairing it to keep it flying for a number of years, as opposed to letting it burn up, might be something that could be really useful. And we're particularly suited for that because of the design. We can fly around and we can do EVAs [extra vehicular activities] out of the vehicle. And we can have robotics on it. [Then] there are satellites that didn't make it to their proper orbit. We might be able to help put them in the right orbit, or start to eliminate debris in the future, which is a big deal. There's a lot of space debris. If you saw the movie Gravity you saw a lot of that stuff going on. We can't fix all the stuff that's happening, but we can stop it from growing, much like we did with our environment around the world. By moving, by getting satellites out of orbit and accelerating their passing through the atmosphere, we could hopefully eliminate more potential satellites colliding with each other in the future. So that's one market.

The second market is the potential construction market. If the space station is going to continue, and NASA's talking about expanding and extending it, then there need to be upgrades and repairs to the station, maybe additional construction on the station. And we can certainly help.

The third market that we look at is the science market. Dream Chaser can conduct extended science in space with people for many weeks, or without people for potentially more than a year. While that work is being done on the space station, there's a fairly limited amount of space on the space station. But the inside of the Dream Chaser is about the same volume of one of the science modules on the space station. So we can do that kind of work.

And the really fascinating part is that we fly it home. So it's a self-contained laboratory. For the first time in history, you can bring your entire laboratory and your experiment back home and look at it in a matter of hoursand then re-outfit it and send it back up again.

We also think, as time goes on, there could be transportation to other destinations. You know, Bigelow is doing private space stations. We can certainly provide transportation to other places if there is an interest in doing that, or even as a free flyer for scientists or potential tourists who want to go to space and come home.

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